Photobucket banned the embedding of images and broke thousands of sites.
The freebie is over. It is no longer possible to drive free traffic from Photobucket through embedded (embedded) photos from this site. Having assigned 100 million users to the free service, the company made it a paid one - and now it is asking for $ 400 for an annual subscription to the embedded images.
The new policy especially brings problems to the most long-time users of Photobucket, who have long since posted photos on Photobucket and published embedded images. The service has been running for 14 years, and it has always been free. Now you have to perezalivat pictures and change all the links.
On June 26, 2017, Photobucket announced in its corporate blog about changes in the terms of service and that the new conditions have been in effect since June 20, 2017.
In the “Account Types” section, three types of accounts are now listed: free (Free), account without banners (Ad-free) and premium (Plus). As indicated, a free account provides 2 GB of disk space for storing photos, but does not allow embedding images on third-party sites. When the limit of 2 GB is exceeded, the account is immediately frozen, and the user can unblock it if he joins the ranks of paid subscribers. An account without banners allows you to remove ads from the Photobucket website after authorizing a user with this type of account, but the ads will be shown to all other visitors when viewing their photos. This type of account costs $ 2.49 per month. Finally, the premium account (Plus) is offered in three types: Plus 50, Plus 100 and Plus 500 for 52, 102 and 500 GB, respectively. Only the third of these accounts, Plus 500, allows you to place an unlimited number of embedded images on third-party hosts. It also provides for viewing the site without advertising, priority user support and storage of photos in full original resolution. The cost of this tariff is $ 39.99 per month or $ 399.99 per year.
The terms of use indicate that publishing on a third-party hosting means, in particular, using the
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to embed an image from your Photobucket account on any forum, bulletin board, eBay auction, blog, and so on.
Most users learned about the changes in the terms of use of the service not from the blog, and when, without any warning, they saw the following message instead of their pictures from Photobucket on third-party sites:
Or this:
Of course, Photobucket as a commercial service has the right to change its terms of use and set any rates for its services. But still it was done in a not very human way. Nobody warned users in advance to give the opportunity to transfer images to another hosting. Thus, by their actions, Photobucket actually “broke” the graphic design on thousands of forums and websites of UGC, where people posted their photos and other images.
Users predictably expressed their indignation. They call the required $ 400 "extortion" under conditions when Photobucket "took the files hostage and demanded ransom" (it’s strange that the service does not require payment only in bitcoins, like other extortionists, one of the affected users writes ). Others say that the site has buried itself with these rates, because no one will pay that amount, but will switch to another hosting.
The tariff seems too high not only because there are free alternatives, but even because you can arrange a normal, your own virtual hosting with gigabytes of data (or a cloud service like Amazon S3 ) and place your photos on it - and it will be much cheaper than premium photobucket service. For example, Amazon S3 offers free hosting for the first year at 5 GB, 15 GB of traffic per month and 20,000 GET requests, and charges $ 0.09 per gigabyte in a year. And if you choose a virtual hosting, you can take 10 GB with unlimited traffic for only $ 2.99 per month, that is 13 times cheaper than the Photobucket.
Photobucket is one of the most popular free photo hosting sites on the Internet. According to his own statistics, the site has 100 million unique users who have posted more than 15 billion images over the entire time. In principle, the owners can be understood: the storage of such a huge number of images and traffic certainly poured into a pretty penny. On the other hand, other free photo hosting somehow cope with this.
The following free photo hosting sites (and just hosting) are suitable for transferring photos with support for embedding images on third-party sites:
You can download all your Photobucket images by downloading the entire album in the Library section.
Fortunately, with the transition to paid rates Photobucket did not remove any old materials. The user can go to the site and manually download all his photos if his account is not blocked. The problem is that in the same forums this procedure must be done by each forum user individually, and in fact many accounts on the forums are already inactive and the users have left. That is, the forum owner will have to accept the loss of a significant part of the graphic design. Instead of pictures, the above mentioned promotional messages from Photobucket will be displayed.
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